Schuyler Weiss opened his masterclass at an MPA occasion throughout the Tokyo Worldwide Movie Competition‘s TIFFCOM market by tackling probably the most steadily requested query in his profession: What does a producer truly do?
Evaluating himself to “a type of cartoon sheepdog, endlessly shifting the flock ahead collectively, unrelentingly pushed, however all the time relentlessly optimistic,” Weiss emphasised the protecting nature of manufacturing. “Above all, protecting of the group, and most significantly, protecting of your entire inventive endeavor,” he mentioned throughout the session.
The producer, who has labored with Baz Luhrmann for roughly 20 years, described filmmaking as an train in stability and rigidity. “Essentially the most quintessential rigidity of all in present enterprise might be between artwork and commerce,” Weiss mentioned. “You may’t have one with out the opposite. You may’t inform tales for nobody, and but to attempt to convene folks collectively to look at a film that has no artwork and has no soul, has no story on the middle of it’s a hole train.”
Weiss started his movie profession as a manufacturing assistant on the Australian Movie Tv and Radio College, touchdown his first job by signing up on a clipboard. His task: defending 20 parking areas throughout peak hour on a Sydney road nook at 4 a.m., armed with parking cones, an orange vest and a clipboard. “From that second on, I used to be hooked,” he mentioned, watching the movie crew assemble round him piece by piece.
Engaged on “Australia” with Luhrmann supplied his complete schooling in filmmaking, from script improvement via international advertising. The expertise included memorable moments like karaoke with Hugh Jackman and the native Fox distribution workforce at 2 a.m. after the Tokyo premiere. “Sadly, I don’t have a photograph of that,” Weiss mentioned.
The journey satisfied him he “by no means needed to only return to at least one half, one slice” of the filmmaking course of. To realize this aim as a producer, Weiss moved to New York Metropolis and began making low-budget unbiased movies. “When you don’t have any cash, it’s important to simply work it out,” he mentioned of constructing ultra-low-budget motion pictures within the U.S. unbiased system.
He produced roughly half a dozen indie movies, a number of premiering at Sundance, together with “Piercing,” based mostly on a Japanese novel by Murakami Ryu. Weiss described his profession philosophy of alternating between several types of challenges: “Pushing your self to maintain up with a fast paced herd with nice expertise and nice energy” versus having “nobody with whom to maintain up, nobody even noticing whether or not you’re going to succeed or fail, besides your self.”
About capturing musical performances on movie, Weiss detailed the in depth preparation required for “Elvis.” The workforce started recording with Austin Butler in Nashville’s RCA studio — the place Elvis himself recorded — roughly a 12 months earlier than capturing started in Australia. “We’re not massive believers in capturing music performances dwell on set,” Weiss defined. “Preparation is the whole lot. You actually need to take some massive leaps, since you’re committing to inventive choices concerning the music properly earlier than you movie something.”
The manufacturing created a hybrid musical language mixing Elvis’s authentic vocals with Butler’s voice. For Nineteen Fifties materials, recorded in mono and unsuitable for contemporary Atmos theater sound, the manufacturing used completely Butler’s vocals. For later live performance footage with multi-track Elvis recordings, they usually blended each voices. “Focus 100% of your power on set to capturing the visible facet of that efficiency, after which you’ll be able to proceed to construct on it within the publish manufacturing course of, musically,” Weiss suggested.
The method proved so profitable that Weiss utilized related strategies to his subsequent movie “The way to Make Gravy,” a sub-$10 million unbiased Australian manufacturing starring Daniel Henshall. For a jail choir sequence, the workforce pre-recorded complicated preparations that might have been inconceivable to seize dwell on set.
“Elvis” confronted distinctive challenges filming throughout the pandemic, notably recreating a performer whose “signature transfer is to get down from the stage within the viewers and kiss nearly each member of the viewers you will discover.” The manufacturing invented options together with an “extras antibacterial mouthwash station.” Weiss credited closed borders with creating sudden advantages: “There was one thing about making a movie in this type of excellent isolation and excellent focus that I believe produced a rare end result.”
The advertising challenges prolonged past manufacturing. Because the then-head of Warner Brothers advertising informed Weiss, “he was going to be damned if he was going to make Austin a star with this film after which have the following man reap the advantages when Austin grew to become a star.” The technique succeeded, inserting Butler on the duvet of each main journal worldwide earlier than launch. “He was a family identify by the point we rolled out the film,” Weiss mentioned. The movie earned a standing ovation at Cannes and grossed over $300 million globally.
Weiss previewed “EPiC: Elvis Presley in Live performance,” a documentary culled from roughly 60 bins of never-before-seen footage from Elvis live shows between 1970 and 1972. Luhrmann traveled to Wellington to work with Peter Jackson on restoration, syncing misplaced audio from work prints. The documentary options roughly 40 minutes of beforehand unheard Elvis dialogue. “Baz dedicated himself to having Elvis narrate the movie. So it truly is Elvis singing and telling his personal tales,” Weiss mentioned. The Imax-finished movie releases worldwide via Common Photos and Neon in late February.
On synthetic intelligence, Weiss revealed the “Elvis” workforce used machine studying strategies roughly a decade in the past, earlier than the time period AI grew to become frequent. To insert Butler into basic Elvis movies, they partnered with the College of Adelaide’s expertise lab slightly than main VFX corporations, who “weren’t actually considering alongside these strains.” “We weren’t calling it AI, and we needed to look outdoors our personal enterprise to do it,” he famous.
As we speak, Weiss and Luhrmann use AI as a inventive software for idea imagery and iteration, although by no means in completed movie merchandise. “Baz is aware of the distinction between inventive and generative, and AI is only a spinoff software that may collage a seemingly infinite, however truly finite bunch of stuff. That’s not creativity.”
Waiting for Luhrmann’s “Joan of Arc” biopic starring 18-year-old English actress Isla Johnson, Weiss positioned the undertaking as a response to unsure instances in Hollywood. “The one approach to proceed to try this is to return again to the place we started: to imagine in authentic storytelling and imagine that, that can win the day,” he mentioned.
The story of a 17-year-old lady in a “fractured and devastated world, her nation on its knees, and the long run for younger folks utterly unsure,” along with her destiny “held tightly within the knobbly fingered grip of a bunch of the entrenched powers,” feels well timed. “Her skill as a 17-year-old lady to interrupt that world broad open and recapture the long run for France at a time of change and peril, looks like a narrative that individuals would possibly see one thing in right now.”
The manufacturing goals to start pre-production subsequent 12 months, with capturing by mid-2026. Weiss acknowledged price range negotiations with Warner Brothers are ongoing, joking that in the event that they don’t attain settlement, “we’re going to be making the 1928 ‘Trial of Joan of Arc.’” The 1928 silent movie by Carl Theodor Dreyer stays “one of the crucial poignant and poetic tellings of the story,” Weiss mentioned, including “we supply the spirit of that in our hearts as we attempt to make our personal” model.
On IP dominance in modern cinema, Weiss drew historic parallels. “There was a time, should you can imagine it, when probably the most positive hearth industrial sort of film that you can make was a Western,” he famous. “Style is a humorous factor that manner. The IP growth within the Marvel comedian ebook sense positively appears to be waning.”
Weiss sees alternative within the present transitional second between industrial traits: “If we’re really discovering ourselves in that barely liminal state between massive industrial traits, that’s an amazing alternative wherein I believe authentic storytelling can actually flourish.”
After “Elvis,” Weiss recommitted to working in Australia and collaborating all through the Asia Pacific area. Bazmark is creating initiatives with an animation firm in Tokyo and a file label in Seoul. “The extra that we are able to join the dots between what we do within the Gold Coast, Australia, all all through this area, we really feel like we’re so excited to play even a small half within the monumental international cultural potential of the APAC area,” he mentioned.
On distribution challenges for smaller movies like “The way to Make Gravy” — based mostly on a preferred Australian track however tough to promote internationally regardless of that includes Hugo Weaving — Weiss acknowledged the panorama has modified. “We’ve damaged down a number of the outdated programs for disseminating and distributing unbiased cinema world wide,” he mentioned. “We’re in a difficult spot proper now.”
Nonetheless, Weiss inspired rising filmmakers to embrace democratized instruments. “The barrier to entry for thus many alternative issues is type of decreased virtually to the ground,” he mentioned, noting that Hollywood studios spend tens of millions making an attempt to optimize what people can accomplish via Instagram and TikTok. “You have got all the identical instruments that Warner Brothers has by way of speaking their film via digital advertising.”
On cultural authenticity versus internationalization, Weiss advocated for leaning into specificity. “The tales that lean into higher authenticity and are much less involved as as to if a broad worldwide viewers goes to select up each single reference” succeed globally, he argued, citing Korean cinema and the Australian animated collection “Bluey.” “Individuals readily eat content material that wasn’t essentially made with a world viewers in thoughts, and folks prefer it all of the extra for it,” Weiss concluded.
